Software-defined networking (SDN) is an implementation of network virtualization, and can separate a control plane from a data plane for a network device using OPENFLOW, thereby implementing flexible control on network traffic and making a network more intelligent as a pipeline.
VxLAN is an overlay network technology or a tunneling technology. In a VxLAN networking architecture, a data packet sent by a virtual machine (VM) is encapsulated in the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) using Internet Protocol (IP)/Media Access Control (MAC) of a physical network as an outer header (outer-header), and then transmitted in an IP network. After the data packet reaches a destination, a VxLAN tunnel endpoint (VTEP) decapsulates the data packet and sends data (the decapsulated data packet) to a target VM.
There is a demand for detecting a real service path of an IP service flow in a network. By means of current path detection based on a conventional network, whether a path in a virtual local area network (VLAN) is connected or disconnected can be detected, but an accurate network path cannot be detected for a virtualized network that uses VxLAN networking.